I'm currently experimenting with transcode, gimp and imagemagick to see if I can get the DVD menus to have an animated background using the following idea...

Choose video to use as background
Use Transcode to convert it into a series of enumerated JPGs.
Use Gimp to create the menu with a transparent background and saving it as PNG with alpha channel.
Using Imagemagick to "merge" the JPGs and the PNG as a batch job.
Using transcode (or mjpegtools) to create the m2v for the menu.

I can't see dvdauthor-0.6.8 in portage yet, even after syncing with a few US mirrors to be sure.
Bonez, can you 'emerge sync' & confirm that it resides in /usr/portage/media-video/dvdauthor/ and comment out PORTDIR_OVERLAY in /etc/make.conf & see if it still emerges 0.6.8 ?

I may be unluckily syncing with not yet up to date mirrors.

Thanx

DOH!!!!!! I hadn't been careful enough to note that the version was NOT up to date. It was my misunderstanding that dvdauthor was not available in portage as a package at all, so when I saw that it was available I failed to check the versions. Many many many appologies to all, 0.6.8 is not yet available to my knowledge. Again, sorry for the confusion.

First of all, I used avidemux2 to find the video that should be played in the background. For my menu, I chose the ending credits of an episode that I was to put on the DVD. This way I got background music right along with it. Avidemux2 shows the current frame position. Write down the start frame and end frame of the video part you want to use. Now we are going to extract that part as a series of jpg pictures using the great transcode tool. (I'll be using NTSC for this example. Switch to 720x576 and 25 fps for PAL )

The generated jpegs will be written to the (hopefully existing directory "pics" given the name "backgroundXXXXXX.jpg" (XXXXXX sequential numbers). Additionally -Z 720x480 --export_asr 2 --keep_asr will scale the video to 4:3 full screen video (adding black borders on top an bottom if necessary). -m music.wav extracts the audio to an uncompressed PCM wave file.

Now that we have the background video split up in images, we can prepare the menu. Load one of the jpgs into the Gimp and keep it as background layer. Now draw your menu in a transparent layer on top of it. Once this is done, hide the background layer and export the picture (should have a transparent background now) as PNG file (e.g. menu.png).

The next step will overlay the images of the background video with the menu PNG using the "composite" tool from ImageMagick.

Code:

for i in pics/*.jpg; do composite menu.png $i $i.png; done

This little shell scripts will take the jpgs from the pics directory and overlay the menu.png over the background images and write them to new files called "backgroundXXXXXX.jpg.png" (PNG because I didn't want yet another lossy compression.) You can check the PNGs with you favorite image viewer if everything went well.

Next step is to create the m2v video for the menu using png2yuv and mjpegtools' mpeg2enc.

i used the VOB files inplace of Matrix.mpg using the exact PAL examples in the original post. when i played them back the sound was delayed by about 5 seconds :-\
i'm just about to go to sleep but i'll be playing with this again in the morning

I had that same problem with the colors. I think the problem might be related to burning animation since I was trying to burn a dvd of South Park. btw, all my stuff is NTSC so I cut 'n' pasted most of the command lines from this tutorial. Also, after the transcode step the video was still okay. It was jacked up after the mplex step where I merged in the separate audio and video files.

I thought it was something to do with my setup, but when I tried it on a normal video file (an episode of Seinfeld) it worked fine. So try a regular file and see if you still get the weird colors?

oh, for the rest of you, the weird colors is like streaks of red that cross the screen. I'll try to get a screenshot or something and post a link.

I followed the steps in the beggining of this thread and everything ran clean until I got to the transcode step. The revdep-rebuild worked fine and I ran it a second time to verify everything was clean. It reported everthing ok on second run.

I've not seen the weird streaks of red both Viperlin & ajayrock speak of.
All my divx video files encode fine. This maybe luck, so:
If someone could provide a link to a small sample video that this occurs on (pre-transcoded), plus the transcode line used when it occurs, I'd be happy to test it out & bug-fix.

Viperlin, for audio sync problems, look near the top of your transcode output for a line like

Pzasso, the above will apply to you also when transcode does finally work as you have an AV Sync auto-correction happening in your transcode output.
But for now, it seems transcode is having problems with MMX on your system.

An incorrect CPU selection in your kernelconfig may also cause this, though you would more than likely see performance problems elsewhere too.
SSE, 3dnow & MMX are CPU instruction sets, do:

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

to check if your CPU supports these. If it does & transcode is still spitting out errors like this, then it's my feeling that it's a bug within transcode & should be posted to the transcode authors -> http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~transcode/
Does it happen with .avi's too ?

Thank you for your quick response. I will try what you have suggested and let you know what happens. I don't think the kernel/cpu config is the problem. I am using an Athlon XP 2600 and the system has been rock solid thus far since I installed Gentoo about 4 months ago.

I am getting the same error even now. Just as a sanity check, I tried this on a Pentium 4 machine that I have. It is running a 2.4.22 kernel while my AMD machine is running a 2.4.20 kernel. I got the same error on that machine as well, even after performing the above steps. The AMD machine has the kernel configured for Athlon XP+ gcc>31. Below is the output from /proc/cpuinfo

little question, i just bumped into a problem, the video is in a widescreen style format and converting it distorts it into streched upwards style video (like when people watch widescreen films in full TV view so they have tall heads.) guess i'd better start again on the video figuring this bit out

little question, i just bumped into a problem, the video is in a widescreen style format and converting it distorts it into streched upwards style video (like when people watch widescreen films in full TV view so they have tall heads.) guess i'd better start again on the video figuring this bit out

Have you tried playing with enforcing the aspect ratios ?
4:3 would be a good start.